ONE TO ANOTHER

What are the ingredients for a stella season in the field and how should we approach comparing different seasons with each other?

- RODERICK EMERY

Depending on exactly when you’re reading this, that’s the season (almost) done and dusted - and how was it for you? Were there birds aplenty? And were they high, wide and handsome? If you get about a bit, it can be difficult to remember precisely where an extraordinary moment took place. Or what made another day a bit “Ho-hum!”

It certainly helps if you keep a game book. When I first started shooting, I didn’t record every outing I went on in a journal - a failing I now regret. I can still remember my first-ever pigeon like it was yesterday but most of the details are lost in the mists of time. Which is a pity.

Keeping a diary of events the highs and lows - allows us, from time to time, to review all the important aspects of a day’s shooting. This in turn, enables us to improve elements of our own performance and to refine aspects of the days when we have the ability to exert the necessary influence to do so. The principal focus of a day’s shooting is, naturally, the shooting itself. We can consider this in terms of our own contribution to the day, the team’s performance as a whole and then address the quality of the sport on offer.

In relation to our own performance, there may be purple patches, where everything within a considerable radius just folds up in fine plate glass window style and plummets to the sward below to await collection.

There may also have been drives where the proverbial barn door could have swanned past with no particular urgency and never had a moment’s concern while doing so.

What was the difference? Was it the same gun, the same cartridges or even the same coat? What was your footing like? Were you on plough? On grass? Or stood on a pallet beside a roaring torrent at the bottom of one of those famous Welsh valleys?